The gasp-and-guffaw-inducing surprises come fast and furious in British-born, Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane,” the first of his many lauded and mordant comedies to be set on this side of the pond.Rest assured there are no buckets of blood in this latest play by the author of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Pillowman,” the film “In Bruges” and much more. (In his “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” produced a few years ago by Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the stage was literally awash with the gory stuff.)
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It’s hard not to judge PlayGround’s seven 10-minute plays — chosen from 177 written by 36 selected writers — according to how well they fit the short format. Onstage at Thick House, the offerings are part of “Best of PlayGround 16,” the 16th annual festival presented by the group dedicated to developing new local voices for theater. Even though some of the pieces may evolve into longer plays and go on to be produced at regional theaters, this year’s batch seems less compelling, less ideally tailored to the required length, than last year’s group.
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Dear Reader,Please forgive me — there is very little I can tell you about “White Rabbit, Red Rabbit,” a solo play by young Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour and read by a different local actor at every performance here at the San Francisco International Arts Festival.The participating actors, as per Soleimanpour’s instructions, do not see the script before the performance begins. They are told a few things in advance, including: Be prepared to impersonate an ostrich and pronounce the author’s name correctly.
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“We got a future,” migrant farmworker George assures his companion, the mentally disabled hulk Lenny, in “Of Mice and Men”: “A couple of acres and some pigs ... a rabbit hutch ...”
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The clipped, repetitive banalities exchanged by the middle-aged couple in the first half of Scottish playwright Linda McLean’s “Any Given Day” recall, in some ways, the dialogue in the mid-20th-century plays of Eugene Ionesco or Harold Pinter. “Jackie wouldn’t come in the dark,” says Bill.“No no,” says Sadie. “She couldn’t come in the dark.”“Don’t worry.”“We couldn’t open the door in the dark.”“No.”“Not once it’s dark.”
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For starters, the set — layers of clutter and grime beneath a slanted skylight (by designer Eileen Diss) — is auspicious. Tom Lishman’s surround-sound effects, of thunderous passing underground trains and cooing pigeons, are equally carefully considered. The stage is awash in an appropriately dismal gray light (by Colin Grenfell). Surely this British production of Harold Pinter’s 1960 absurdist tragi-comedy “The Caretaker” onstage at the Curran Theatre will be one for the ages.So it is.
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During the second act of Annie Baker’s delicate, mesmerizing and almost hyper-realistic three-hander “The Aliens” onstage at SF Playhouse, KJ — a 30-something college dropout with an undisclosed mental condition who requires meds — obsessively repeats the word “ladder.”
He repeats it too many times to count. He repeats it steadily, seemingly endlessly. He repeats it mostly monotonically, hypnotically, but at one point suddenly infuses the word with deep psychic pain.
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For starters, the set — layers of clutter and grime beneath a slanted skylight (designer, Eileen Diss) — is auspicious.
Tom Lishman’s surround-sound effects, of thunderous passing underground trains and cooing pigeons, are equally carefully considered.
The stage is awash in an appropriately dismal gray light (by Colin Grenfell).
Surely this British production of Harold Pinter’s 1960, absurdist tragi-comedy “The Caretaker” onstage at the Curran Theatre will be one for the ages.
So it is.
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Sometimes a playwright can be a little too close to the material. In Matthew Lombardo’s two-act drama “High” – running through Sunday at the Curran Theatre – Sister Jamie (raspy-voiced Kathleen Turner, with a blond ponytail and an admirable tough-girl stance) is ordered by a priest, Father Michael (Tim Altmeyer), to rehabilitate a 19-year-old junkie, Cody (Evan Jonigkeit). He was found in a motel room with a dead, underage boy. The priest has personal reasons for wanting to protect Cody.
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Amid a plethora of contemporary romantic comedies about young people seeking their identities, New York playwright Carly Mensch’s off-Broadway two-hander, “Now Circa Then,” is a charmer, fresh and inventive.In its well-cast West Coast premiere at TheatreWorks, Meredith McDonough directs with assured comic timing and just the right degree of gravity.Margie and Gideon are working as re-enactors at a history museum on the Lower East Side, like the actual Tenement Museum.
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If you doubt whether six actors can effectively play all necessary roles in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” or whether the entire five-act play can be compacted into 90 intermissionless minutes in a small theater and still make a huge impact, look no further than African-American Shakespeare Company. For that matter, it might seem surprising that this powerful production is directed by playwright-actor-director Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s best known for the broad political satires produced by the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
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Two-thirds of the way into “The Right Thing,” I felt a twitch of impatience: Would I be able to sustain interest in the outcome of the mediation process around which this 90-minute, nonstop-talky drama is structured? Or would I ultimately fail to care about the fate of high-powered CEO Zell Gardner, fired for sexual harassment?Credit playwright AJ Baker, powerhouse actor Catherine Castellanos as the train wreck of a central character and the rest of the able cast, plus director Suze M. Allen, with keeping me tuned in throughout.
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“How are you?” That’s the cheerful, empty question that Brian Copeland faces repeatedly — from friends, acquaintances and strangers — at the beginning of his latest solo autobiographical piece, “The Waiting Period.” “Fine,” he mutters hastily.But he’s not fine at all — in fact, everything, including hair, hurts — and over the course of about 75 minutes, we learn why.
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In the Estonian folktale upon which Cutting Ball Theater’s new experimental piece is loosely based, little Lona (a piquant, pigtailed Marilet Martinez) lives with her father and a cruel stepmother (Madeline H.D. Brown, vibrant and faintly malevolent).
Gathering strawberries dangerously near the Tontlawald — the “ghost forest” — Lona is captivated by a free-spirited nature girl (a charismatic Rebecca Frank).
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In Lebanese-Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s lengthy and ambitious drama “Scorched” — onstage at American Conservatory Theater — events unfurl with the grim inevitability of a Greek tragedy.In present-day Quebec, a pair of chronically angry twins meet with the notary Lebel, the executor of their mother’s estate. Recently deceased after an unexplained five-year silence, their mother, Nawal, has bequeathed the twins an unwanted task: to deliver a pair of sealed letters, one to the father they never met, the other to the brother they never knew existed.
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